


Now and Then

by SegaBarrett



Category: Once Upon A Time In Hollywood (2019)
Genre: Future Fic, M/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-02
Updated: 2020-08-02
Packaged: 2021-03-05 21:22:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,264
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25662046
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SegaBarrett/pseuds/SegaBarrett
Summary: Rick looks back.
Relationships: Cliff Booth/Rick Dalton
Comments: 6
Kudos: 19
Collections: Rare Pairs Exchange 2020





	Now and Then

**Author's Note:**

  * For [violet_strange](https://archiveofourown.org/users/violet_strange/gifts).



“Hello, everyone, my name is Kellie Ann Gould, and I am here with Rick Dalton to celebrate the 50th anniversary of cult classic Italian western Nebraska Jim. We’re filming this for the Blu-Ray… or you might be watching us on YouTube if some jerk went ahead and uploaded it illegally. Rick, can you tell us a little bit about what the process was like for you?”

The camera panned over to Rick, who was sitting in a swivel chair with his legs up and his arms crossed over his chest.

“No, I can’t,” he quipped, then continued, “Well, that’s… why you’re all here, isn’t it? I would hope so, at least.”

He stretched out his arm and groaned, bringing it back in and rolling his shoulder.

“Hurts like hell,” he grumbled, “Stiff as hell.”

“At least that’s still stiff, huh Rick?” Cliff called. He was leaning on the trailer and, if Rick was being completely honest, looking like a straight up asshole. Fifty years and as far as he could tell, the man hadn’t gained a year. 

“Ah, shut up. I’m falling apart bit by bit,” Rick fired back. “D-did you wanna start rolling again? Cause you better not leave that shit in. No one needs to see that. And Cliff, you’re throwin’ off my whole… vibe. You’re going to make me all nervous and shit.”

Cliff rolled his eyes.

“I’ll be back in a couple hours. With drinks.” Rick heard, but didn’t see, the swift footsteps exiting the trailer.

“So what do you think brings people back to Nebraska Jim after all these years?”

“Well, I don’t know – ah, Kellie, was it? I think part of it’s cause there was… well, less moral ambiguity. If you look at it, these guys they do bad shit – uh, stuff – sometimes, but you know who’s a good guy and who’s a bad guy. Nowadays the hats are all mixed up and you end up watchin’ twenty-four episodes of something to find out that nobody in the whole damn show is a good guy. And that’s just exhausting for me these days. What was I talkin’ about anyway? Ah, yeah. Good ol’ Nebraska Jim. That was a fun time… We were out in Italy for a while, made a few pictures out there, but this was my favorite.” 

Rick leaned back just a little bit and closed his eyes. It felt odd to be back here. It wasn’t only fifty years since Nebraska Jim, after all, but it was fifty years since that day he and Cliff had had to defend themselves against that damn bunch of hippies – and fifty years since the day they had thought they were going their separate ways forever.

***

Rick sat on a pillow in the middle of Sharon Tate’s floor, craning forward to listen to something Abigail Folger was saying about social work – from what he had caught at the beginning of the story, it had to do with a former colleague who had insisted that a client be moved out of his therapy group because he liked the Yankees. Rick’s mind, however, was miles away, up the 101, in a hospital bed next to Cliff.

He shouldn’t have left him there. It was a weird thought, considering Cliff had needed to go to the hospital and there was no other option, and Cliff had told him not to follow until the morning. Visiting hours were probably over, too, and there wasn’t really anything he could do about that either.

But it all felt like a cop-out, especially with the conversation he had had with Cliff earlier.

He had told him that he couldn’t afford him anymore, and here he was watching Sharon Tate laugh as she tilted back her head. She was telling a story, now, something that had happened on the set of Eye of the Devil. 

“And then I tripped right down the stairs,” she ended with a chuckle, “I was Freya for real that time.” She cocked her head to the side slightly and looked at Rick. “Are you all right? You’ve been quiet, Rick. You must be shaken up after what happened. Do you need to take a breath? Get up, walk around?”

“Shaken up?” Rick replied, “No, uh, nuh, not me. It’s just… I mean, hella humid. Summers in LA.” 

Not as simple as all that, at least, as he tried to puff out his chest and be the man the people in this room had been hoping to see. Jake Cahill wouldn’t have been sitting here wondering about it, and neither would Nebraska Jim.

The bronco buster… well, maybe. Maybe he would allow his thoughts to drift to the man he used to be.

***

“Working on these movies… well, they weren’t exactly classics, were they? I mean, you just called ‘em a cult classic, so I guess in a way they are, but… what does that even mean, really?” Rick asked, looking into the lens and cocking his head to the side. “But, I mean, here they are. For anyone who wants to, uh, enjoy them. That was a weird year… for me. I mean for us. Hey, are you gonna… gonna use all of this? Cause I don’t know if any of this is really want you want or… do you just want me to go ahead and watch the movie and, uh, like talk about what’s happening? Cause most of it is pretty obvious. Like if some guy is getting shot, do you want me to say, uh, ‘yeah then Nebraska Jim shot that guy’. Cause I mean… I think they can usually figure that out.”

“Just keep talking. We’ll edit it later, Rick. We want it to have that kind of, you know, off the cuff kind of feel to it, if you know what we mean. Like you’re looking back at all of this and the memories are just flooding back. People want to feel nostalgia.”

“Ah, well, if you stop the DVD at, uh, what is it, 25:59 exactly, you can see my stuntman Cliff. He’s the one going over the, well, the cliff actually. He’s always good at, uh, doing that kinda stuff. Trust me on this, the guy never gets injured…”

He paused, his breath hitching for a moment. He wasn’t going to start crying, not now, not when it was fifty years ago and he had managed to stop thinking about that night. If there were some damn things out there worth crying about, this wasn’t one of them because it was done and over with. 

There was no point in remembering how scared he had been. Not of the girl in the pool with the knife, but of the woozy look on Cliff’s face. Of the crumbling of immortality.

***

Rick’s brain felt like it was on fire. He couldn’t stop thinking about it, no, wait, he needed to be frank about it – he couldn’t stop thinking about him.  
He stood up and looked around the room, getting a few odd glances, and Voytek Frykowski woke up slightly out of the nap he was taking on the floor, next to the couch, before changing the channel on the TV and rolling back over again. 

“Are you all right, Rick?” Sharon inquired, and Rick’s tongue hung slightly out of his mouth. Way to blow his cover constantly. Way to ruin his image as Jake Cahill.  
But if he was being honest with himself, he had never been Jake Cahill. Jake Cahill had never had self-doubt, had never had anyone he let get close enough to him to be afraid of losing them. You were just a number to Jake Cahill, after all. 

He had wanted nothing more than this for so much of his life – to hit it big, to be surrounded by the most beautiful movie stars of his generation. When he had felt like he was trapped playing the Heavy, that was all he had been able to think about, how he was so close and yet so far and how he was never going to make it there because he had taken a wrong step back somewhere.

Now, he had it all.

But he should have been careful what he had wished for.

“My friend… The one who was with me when we were attacked… He’s in the hospital. I can’t stop thinking about it. When I said, uh, nobody was hurt… He was. He had a knife in his side.” There it was. And if they saw behind the façade, then…

“And you love him,” Jay said, so matter-of-factly that Rick was sure he had only heard the assertion in his mind. “Does he love you too?”

Rick dragged a hand down his face.

“I don’t know. What? This ain’t the kind of shit that I talk about, okay? I just – I just… hey, I mean… how did you even know? Am I still drunk? What are we even talking about?”

“Don’t worry about that. Let’s get you in the car before you burst a blood vessel,” Jay said, “Otherwise you’ll end up in the bed next to him.”

***

“Look here… Will I have the little cursor thing? You know, the little laser light? Like I’m tryin’ to get a cat to chase Cliff?”

He smiled, fondly. Back then, things had felt simple. For Cliff, it must have been the rush of adrenaline, the feeling of being invincible. And that was contagious. 

Cliff had never had much, in comparison to Rick. Rick would avoid going out to Cliff’s tiny trailer, but the times he had he had been struck by the fact that his friend hadn’t needed for much.

And struck by a sense of taking advantage and scrambling to fix it by letting Cliff run around his huge, empty house whenever he wanted to.

“Well, here’s Cliff again. Look, you can see him doin’ this turn when Nebraska Jim… well he’s going off to fight somebody or other. I honestly don’t remember who, but they’re bad. So they all die. One thing that I like about all these westerns is it’s pretty clear – the bad people die. I mean, some good people die too – sometimes that happens. But all of the bad people always die. And then it’s like they never existed in the first place.”

Rick snaked a finger to his mouth and slowly bit a nail, letting out a long sigh.

“Nebraska Jim never gets the girl, though. That’s the damnedst part of it all. He’s too busy fighting.”

***

Rick was sure that they had scraped Sharon’s car on the way to the hospital, because on one of Jay’s turns had resulted in an ear-splitting shriek.

To be fair, it had been a little bit Rick’s fault, because he had remembered Cliff’s request for bagels and waved wildly at the bagel shop, aptly called The Bagel, they had just passed.

“Back to the shop before Roman gets home, I guess,” Sharon said sheepishly, after Rick had re-entered the car with a bag full of everything and cinnamon raisin bagels. “Quick, turn here. Get into this lot. You want to park over by maternity. Trust me, I’ve been here more times than I can count the last few months, there’s a prime spot right… There. No one parks there because it always looks like you’re going to hit this tree that looks like the Loch Ness Monster.” When Jay pulled the car into alignment with a jerk that made Rick wonder if the man had passed driver’s ed or just given the instructor a particular good haircut, Sharon clapped her hands on the dashboard and reached back to pop Rick’s door open.

“Go get your boy, okay?” Sharon said. “Wait. Don’t forget the bagels. They’re actually usually out of them, so it was your lucky day.” She thrust the bag at him and he went running from the door, stumbling almost, ignoring the nurse who kept calling to him that visiting hours were over. She didn’t budge, though.

No one told Jake Cahill what he could or couldn’t do.

***

Rick’s head turned as he felt the hand on his shoulder. 

“Cliff!” he exclaimed, rising slowly from his seat. Cliff reached out and grabbed his shoulder.

“Hold on there, partner,” he replied, teasing and grinning. “You ready to go, or did they still need your ugly mug for promo pictures?”

“Nah, just my, ah, ugly voice Cliff. They want commentary.”

Cliff leaned in, over the microphone.

“Here’s your commentary – he’s comin’ with me. I got a dinner reservation, and we’re late. We’ll be getting’ some tacos and beer.”

“Living the high life,” Rick said, “Living like a champion.”

“That’s right,” Cliff said, “Livin’ like Jake Cahill, if he ever got married.”

And Cliff leaned in to kiss him.

***

The clamor with which Rick burst into the hospital room must have been what woke Cliff up; must have been what made him look up at Rick with a dazed and confused look, followed by a pleased one.

But not a surprised one.

Because he always knew he’d come in the end, Rick realized suddenly.

This wasn’t what they showed in Nebraska Jim, where “the end” was delineated by being the last one alive, and this wasn’t the end for any bronco buster who outlived his usefulness, doomed to be put out to pasture as he broke down, remembering who he once. 

But he was neither one of them, after all.

He was a man in love, in the greatest city on Earth. In the greatest decade on Earth. 

So far, at least.


End file.
